This Week in WordPress #145

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 145 recorded on Monday the 11th of January, 2020 today. Joining me as always, I've got Paul Lacey, but I'm also joined by Dovi and Michelle Frechette. There's an awful lot to talk about. First stop. We talk about word Fest live, which is a new. Happening soon WordPress event running over 24 hours later this month, then we talk about learn.wordpress.org, and the fact that you can get free tutorials online directly from WordPress.
We also talk about WordPress is move into the freelancing space. Price point of $5,000, you can have them build your WordPress website. Does this conflict and bother current WordPress freelancers. We also talk about our WordPress Tavern article all about the opportunities that are presented to freelancers and WordPress developers with the new blocks and full site editing capabilities.
Next stop liquid web. There are acquiring the events, calendar plug-in, which is very popular. 50 employees go over to liquid. And we also talk about the fact that WP Tavern, the stalwarts of WordPress news is having a bit of a remake. What does it mean what's happening to them? You can find out. All about this and more on this weekend, WordPress, this weekend, WordPress is brought to you this week by AB split test.
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test.com. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello again, I'm going to say hello. One more time. How's everybody doing it is. If we can WordPress we're on episode number 7,318,
but it's the first time that we've done this in ages because we've had the Christmas break and then we were supposed to go live last week, but I'm blaming that man over there for not wanting to go live. We had too much on essentially. Didn't we pull on. So we just started we're back. We're back this week in WordPress, I'm joined by Paul Lacey over there.
We'll hear from him in a moment, Michelle, for Schatz she's there. And also now Dovi do forgive me. I'm going to, I'm going to butcher your surname. Dover poke cheese. Sure
[00:02:34] I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:34] was reasonably close. I think let's talk about WordPress anyway. And first of all, just quick introduction. Very brief, if that's all right, cause we're going to repurpose this as audio and nobody can see what we're going to be just stimulating way from Paul. What's your relationship with WordPress?
And then we'll go to Michelle and Doby.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:52] Alright. Yeah. Happy new year, everybody. And and yeah, I'm Paul Lacey currently from Dicky bird studio more on that later. I'm recently going through a midlife crisis, so I got some B had died and and dyed my beard a bit darker. What'd you think?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:07] I, can you tell difference? It's only audio, especially everybody listening to us
[00:03:14] eyebrows. I can see
Paul Lacey: [00:03:15] the difference. I didn't do the eyebrows, and my daughter's way can see the difference. So this podcast sponsored by just for men.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:28] YouTube. We're going to take us down because you said that was sponsored by.
Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it. Michelle, what about you? Where are you from?
Michelle Frechette: [00:03:39] I'm in Rochester, New York. I'd work for give WP where I'm the head of customer success. And I am the speaker Wrangler for word Fest, which we're going to tack a button, little
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:47] lie. We are, we're going to deal with that right off the bat.
Number one. But lastly, Dovi tell us about I'm
[00:03:53] Doby posties originally in Alaska and assassin. No born and raised in Alaska, but now, currently in Virginia an hour away from DC. Imagine what my life's like right now. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:03] What not? We are not getting, I know we know where we're getting into that, but you've you've identified yourself as a, as an Alaskan assessment.
Another reason for YouTube to probably take us down. And they've probably all this already heard the word and it's gone. It's come from the internet. Anyway, we are here to talk about WordPress each and every week. We have a bit of a WordPress session. We talked about the WordPress news from the previous week.
We're actually going to go a little bit further afield because we've missed so many weeks there's bits and pieces that were sweeping up as well. So we'll do that. First of all, before we begin, WP builds.com. If you want to follow all the stuff that we do a podcast episode and a Thursday, and then we do this live every Monday morning comes out as an audio podcast tomorrow morning at seven.
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So let's get stuck into it. Shall we? The first item that we're going to discuss this week is all to do with this thing. Yeah. It's all to do with word fest.live. But Paul, I'm going to hand over to you to introduce all this stuff.
Paul Lacey: [00:05:38] What first is. Branded as the festival of WordPress word Fest. It's not an official it's not like a word camp or anything like that.
I'm going to hand actually, I'm going to hand over to Michelle. Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:49] nice. Nice. I'm going to hand it over to Dovi. Who's finally going to give it back to me. Yeah. But
Paul Lacey: [00:05:55] all I can say is that I know there's not like a lot of other. Events mentioned or announced yet this year, because they don't really know what's going on.
But to be honest, I really feel like this is going to be my favorite event of 2021. If anyone, if you go to the website, word fest.live, just check out the website, how beautiful the website is. All of the speakers. It just feels like a fun, it doesn't feel like an event happening in the middle of a global pandemic and we're all depressed and stuff.
It's very lovely looking event. I was a speaker I'm not anymore more on that. That's my fault. I've had to drop out, but I'll allude to that later on. But Michelle all of the speakers have been confirmed now, apart from the ones who dropped out. And so I don't know if you want to speak of.
Speak of the event and let us know anything that we need to know the latest news on it and stuff.
Michelle Frechette: [00:06:48] Yeah, absolutely. So the idea behind this was Dan, maybe, and Paul smart and I were having a we have a weekly, they're actually doing it right this moment, a weekly fundraising meeting for big orange heart.
So big hearts, heart is the organization behind word Fest. And I know you've spoken a big horn chart before. It is a charity. That's a hundred percent dedicated to wellness, wellbeing, mental health in the remote work community. Originally WPN up. So it really started with WordPress. And then now it's grown beyond that point.
We had a conversation back in, I want to say October where we started talking about giving Tuesday and what will we going to do for giving Tuesday? And they had a a summit last year, which was about, I would think about six or eight hours long. And did we want to do something like that? And then we were saying, okay, We really don't have enough time to pull that up.
So maybe we could do something like that in the spring. And then we thought why don't we try to be the first one in the new year? And you know how, like that little snowball starts at the top of the mountain and it continues to grow until it's wiped out the entire town below. Oh, our volunteers.
Did it feel like the town down below because this thing has taken on Epic proportions. But we're so proud of it. We're so excited about it. And although we are tired, Of all the work we've been doing it. It's not even here yet. We just are absolutely 100%. Excited to put this on.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:09] One of the, one of the things that I'm really interested in is the it's no other event in that you've decided to span it across an entire day, literally meaning an entire day.
So it's 24 sessions spanning different time zones. Is that what these stages are about the different, do these stages represent those time zones or how does that work?
Michelle Frechette: [00:08:26] Yes and no. So there's actually 48 sessions. And so on the global stage will be 24 sessions. So that runs all day. The other stages we'll run during various time zones.
So we, we started Oceania. We go from there to Asia then to Europe in the middle East. And then we've finished in the Americas. And so the idea is we actually do span the globe with time zones. That's not to say you could only watch in your own time zone, but we don't encourage somebody to watch 24 hours straight because we are after all about your mental health and wellbeing.
And we do believe that you should have some sleep as well. And so like I've taken that day off from work so that I can not be torn back and forth because I am working with the. The speakers all day long, but even I will be taking naps and, not putting my own mental health and wellbeing on the line for this event.
So there are there are four different stages that represent those four different areas. How
Paul Lacey: [00:09:20] do
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:21] we first of all, the date, 22nd of January, so it's really looming larger, got 11 days left. How do we how do we go and register an interest? Or can we just rock up on the date or do we need to create some kind of email form or you do need to
Michelle Frechette: [00:09:33] register?
So if you click hover over that register on the left-hand side, you can see there's attendees and donors, but if you click register at the top, you'll be able to actually grab that ticket. Tickets are free. We do have an opportunity on that ticket form to be able to give a $10 donation with your ticket, but that is completely optional.
But every month, every penny that we raised through this event, through our sponsorships and through any donations, absolutely are going to fund the charity this year. As we continue to work with our remote work community. And as we know with the global pandemic has made things even more difficult, more people have found themselves working remotely.
And those who worked remotely before are finding themselves in different positions than they might've been because where they might've been the only person working at home. Now they've got homeschooling their children and spouses and other family members also at home. So all of us could use a little extra help this year and big orange heart is there for that.
And bird Fest is here for two reasons. Number one, so that we can continue the work that we do as big orange heart. Number two. Okay. We really want word Fest to be fun. We want it to be a celebration of WordPress and the community that surrounds where press we've got 48 amazing speakers that are literally we, we really went for diversity.
This, we want to make sure that all the regions that I mentioned around the globe are represented. We want to make sure that there's women and men and minorities. And because we want this to be a true cultural celebration around WordPress as well.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:54] I love this one cam Cameron Jones, who very often ends up in the chat in here.
He's got beautifully titled talk,
Michelle Frechette: [00:11:04] I think that's probably going to attract a few people to find out exactly what he means by that. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:08] it's great. It's perfect. It's great marketing. Isn't it. So a really broad range of subjects. It's not like you're SEO. Conference or your, I don't know, your page builder conference.
Like we did it. It's just everything. You're trying to Bumble as many ideas as you can.
Michelle Frechette: [00:11:22] We want wanted, yeah, we really want a diversity of topics as well, especially with 48. If you came to a conference for 48 SEO talks, you might be like a little like redundant at some point. So we have things about accessibility.
We have things about mental health and wellness. We have things in there about coaching and about. Making sure that you are good. We have yoga session. We have all kinds of different, fun things. Tracy apps switches right there towards the top of the list has 2020 killed your spirit to same. Let's find out why, so all of those different things are really there.
Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:53] And giving us a nice smile on the chat. That's really nice. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Michelle Frechette: [00:11:58] So there's going to be a lot of different diversity in the topics. And we wanted to make sure that we put something out there that would. Appeal to anybody.
Paul Lacey: [00:12:05] Thank you. Have you done with the idea of things like strict tracks on this event?
We've worked camps, it's normally tech content, community or something like that. It seems that there's no rules here. You can, it's this is a community event. You can present what you want to talk about. And. And that's how you've chosen the talks. Yeah,
Michelle Frechette: [00:12:25] exactly.
One of the challenges, what are the challenges, especially, I'm gonna S I'm gonna call myself out here. One of the challenges for people around the world. And I would say that they, that in the United States, we probably deal with this more than anybody else. Yeah. Leo is a hundred percent guaranteed.
Dan will be on 26 hours. Absolutely. But time zones tend to be something that are very confusing and I am the biggest. Person to not ever understand time zones. I'm constantly finding a website. That'll tell me, somebody says, Oh, due to the clock. So if you actually, if you can pull that schedule back up, I want to show you some really cool feature.
And so if you click the plus side under any one of those. There's a link to see what that's going to be in your local time. Now this is UTC, which is the same as Greenwich meantime. So it's not going to be any different for you, but it is different for me. So I'm going to see what time it is in Rochester, New York somebody else is going to be able to see, what does that UTC time look like for me so that you can plan accordingly and have a better understanding of what that means.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:24] Yeah, that's nice. One of the, when we did the page builder summit, that was one of the few groups that we got in the emails on the first email we sent out, we just wrote it in British, UK time and people were saying, can you please differentiate it so that we know, and this service is great.
I've stolen it done. I'm going to use it. Build a summit. Yeah, this is for our business. This is a really great event. So just quick recap, it's word Fest dot. Life we're looking at the forward slash schedule, but work fast. Don't live. Great. So yeah, Paul back to you, I
Paul Lacey: [00:13:56] think. Yep. The next, next up we've got a new project which seems to be from the official wordpress.org website called learn WordPress.
And you can get to that website by going learn.wordpress.org and actually above the core. I think I've said that, who is somebody who I met her. Digitally actually at Bristol WordPress meetup in the UK, it was a streamed thing. And I remember meeting her there and we, I've kept in touch, off on and off since then.
And she sent me a message on Twitter the other day about this new program, which I think she's leading actually called land, or she's at least one of the co. Leaders in it and it's all about whether or not it says on the roadside, wherever you're a first time blogger or a seasoned developer, there's always more to learn within WordPress from the community members.
Over the world. And so they're building what they hope to be a huge resource of workshops and lesson plans and even full courses. I think one of the things that I personally really like about this is something that I haven't seen too much in this kind of website before, which is the lesson plans.
So you've got the traditional kind of stuff. Yeah. Where you can, you can go on and watch a word. I know a WordPress workshop that could be about SEO. It could be about anything and you can, maybe that's a five minute workshop or something. You'll learn a small thing because it's very important.
There's some full courses in there as well, but there's lesson plans is the interesting thing. When you go to the website, you can access the lesson plans, and let's say you are somebody that wants to show other people how to learn WordPress. You can look for instance, at one of the lesson plans, keeping WordPress site secure.
So first of all, the plan will tell you that this is for instance, a good lesson to teach for about 45 minutes. Yeah, it will tell you it'll teach you the things that you need to know make sure that you've got all the key points that leave and give you a suggested lesson plan and some exercises that people can do at the end of the lesson and assessment.
And also you can see the person that wrote it. So you can even, connect with that person on Twitter and speak to them about it and suggest any further ideas. Not only that they're actively looking for people to. So you contribute to, to this. And there is a lot of stuff on that already. So this definitely has already got a kind of critical mass of good content on there.
But I know that if anyone is thinking about getting into contributing to WordPress in a fairly casual way, but a very meaningful way, then I think going to the learn website and contributing a little workshop or even a full course or whatever would be really cool.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:30] Nice. I haven't delved into this at all other than the fact that it exists.
I've not looked at those lesson plans or what the depth is or anything, but it's just a nice fell anthropic effort. Just looking at what's on our screen. We're sharing the screen at the minute. There's the six courses. Is that what we're calling these
Paul Lacey: [00:16:45] workshops? Those are just recent workshops.
There's a lot more than that functional courses.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:51] A workshop then is a workshop like a live event that happened?
Paul Lacey: [00:16:54] No, it's more just like a. A very condensed lesson in a way. So it's what you might imagine seeing a word camp event, where someone teaches you. So for instance, the one we can see on our screens at the moment, which is using the media library by , I think that's Courtney, murdered that name of pronunciation there, but it's, I've looked at that one for instance, and.
It's taking, you can take it for granted that everybody knows how to use the media library, but it's still not the most easy thing to use. I'm often teaching clients. Okay. When you've uploaded a document, this is how you can get the URL of the document. And so even if you're working with clients like I do, you can still find some great things in here to educate some of your clients.
And again, what you can see on the screen here on the right hand side is WordPress for kids. Part one. So all the kids in the UK at the moment are stuck at home. All our schools are closed and I know that word comes for instance, they've, there's been kids workshops before. And so there's some lovely stuff in here to teach to how to get your kids involved with this.
And get them off Fortnite for a bit. And far less constructive.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:04] Can I just say, honestly, that is going to be WordPress nil fortnight 52 fortnight, but it's a nice gesture though. Isn't it? Do you know what interests me about this is, I wonder if any of these could be like redeployed.
Obviously not the how to use track workshop, for example, but I wonder if some of these could be repackaged for clients, like the media library ones strikes me as a really useful thing, struggling with the media library. Just go watch this. And you've saved yourself a few hours.
Explaining how the media like, minutes probably explaining how the media library works. Don't worry. You were mentioned it about me scrolling up. There was something. Oh, access lesson plans. Got it. Yeah, the plans
[00:18:41] are there. Okay. So I think it's Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, you go ahead. Okay, I'll go ahead.
I think this is actually really great because it's like a private UME essentially for WordPress. And if anybody has actually built anything, that there are a million ways to do the same thing, right? You go out there and you try and program one piece and it's completely different. I think this gives us a more modern take.
I'm going to guess that every single one of these videos is going to be focused about around the modern methods or the best. The Gutenberg, et cetera. And so I think that's nice. My question will be is how do you curate it? And what what if somebody wants to do an add onto an existing one, in build.
That's where I'm going to be interested to see, but at least from the interim, it's a great start.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:27] Yeah. Let's have a quick look at these lesson plans. I'm just going to click on. You
Michelle Frechette: [00:19:30] clicked her. I'm going to say that we do have a session with Angela gin about where the new learn word, press.org at word fast, and there will be live Q and a.
So it's a good opportunity to learn more about it. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:43] Go to wordpress.life. Check out WordPress. Yeah. So we've got things like create joining WordPress Slack. So that's obviously, if you want to contribute to the project on a more meaningful level speaker training workshop. Ooh, that's interesting.
60 minutes on how to upskill yourself as a speaker. That's cool. Creating,
Paul Lacey: [00:20:03] The speaker training one is really cool because let's say that you're. You really want to do something in the area and you're not yet ready to go on a physical stage cause we can't anyway, but let's say you I would love to do a zoom based word, WordPress meet up in front of say 10 people and it'd be a big thing, but I don't really know how to go about this on here.
You can find something that you're fairly comfortable with because it's already yours. Yeah. Let's say WordPress security basics. You can do the speaker training workshop to learn. About some really super tips on how to actually deliver a talk and you can get a lesson plan on something that you might be already planning to do talk about.
So you can really put some of these pieces together and and get involved. And I think that is one of the main outcomes that they're hoping that this just gets more people involved because community's taken a big hit. In the last 12 months. And this is definitely, I'm going to connect a few people together.
Again,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:02] this is recycled content in some cases, in other words, are we looking at like word, press.tv or stuff that's been a word camp. I was just the reason I wondered that is because I saw that word child themes 2016 was a, I just didn't know that anybody would be creating that content 45 minutes left on the voucher.
2016. So that's interesting. Anyway, there's seven. We're currently looking at a page. It's probably got 10 courses on that page. And according to the pagination at the bottom, the seven such pages. So there's, it looks like there's an absolute ton of content 60 plus. Wow. Okay. So there's an absolute ton of content on there.
So learn.wordpress.org. If you're interested in learning about WordPress, maybe it's something really bizarre that you think probably isn't on there. It might be worth checking out, but the fact that they've got stuff like how to. How to stand up and do speaking public speaking really interesting.
I'm wondering, you've got services. I'm going to do a segue, right? I'm announcing a segue cause I never managed to pull off a segue. Here we go. Here comes the segue WP one Oh one and such services are. They're businesses, right? They're out there and they provide this stuff. They provide courses for people basically like this.
So I'm wondering if, what they would think about that. In other words, there's a philanthropic effort here by the community, which is undermining their business model. Here comes the segue. Now we're going to move to this piece. Yeah. You see what I did there? Paul, I'm going to hand it over to
Paul Lacey: [00:22:24] you.
This is definitely the juiciest piece we've got going this week, especially the fallout from this as well. So just to read the headline out for anyone listening, wordpress.com, rattles the freelancer community. We have a new website building service launch. Okay. So in a nutshell the announcement and.
I think there's a lot of assumptions that we have to that, that, all the reactions to this based on a lot of assumptions but this is how it looks. It looks like a wordpress.com and by automatic launched a new website, building service, they've got a landing page for it and the way they kind of position this is they talk about, let's just go to the page on my screen.
One second. They talk about your site. Built by us, but built for you. And then it shows a bunch of screenshots of different web pages, including the welcome to the Swedish museum of modern art, which has a really funny one on there. And and then it gives you a very basic idea that perhaps you might want an online store.
You might want an educational website or a professional services website, and then they talk about the pricing point and they're starting their prices at $4,900. And then you can apply to get that. Now, this is upset. Apparently a lot of the freelancer community, because this is a really odd thing for someone like automatic to do from a particular perspective.
So you're looking at a company that's had, 300 million, was it from Salesforce or, however many millions from different investment things. And they've got all these big plans. And then the hit in the, what Matt Madeiras would call the blue collar website, builder or website implementer right at a price point that is competing with a ton of the community that some people would say built the success of WordPress.
And you got to ask yourself, Why are they doing this? And is it a big thing that they're doing, or is this an intrepreneur within the company of automatic asked to set up a side project and is going along with that? Now I can speak of this from a personal point of view because I won't spend too much time on this.
Just very briefly. My, my business sticky birds is a victim of 2020, and we are closing down our business in the next month or so. Yeah, but it's fine. So I'm going back to being a independent consultant which I'm extremely happy about. And I didn't quite honestly enjoy the role of CEO of a larger, not particularly large company, but a larger company over the last couple of years.
And we saw our business development opportunities that we normally get every single year. We did absolutely find cashflow when it came to seminars looking forward to the next year. I couldn't see many of the big opportunities that we'd normally, so that along with a bunch of other things and the economic stuff, and then further lockdowns, I made a decision.
The, it was time to look at the writing on the wall and that we would close down and go our separate ways and thrive in a different way. Now I'm technically putting myself right in competition with automatic here. I'm not personally bothered about this. Don't think that it's probably a particularly well for, I idea, I think that they need to stay in their lane and and I'm sure that it's getting just outsourced.
And I think David, a bit more about that. All I can say from a personal point of view as someone as a small agency moving into being a freelancer again, is that. Man. This is bad timing to have that time of year where people lose their jobs, companies shut down and then automatic puts something out that they don't need the money.
They don't need to do that to say, Hey, we're going to start competing with a huge portion of the community. I'm not the only one, a little bit annoyed about that. Matt Madeira Ross has made pretty. Escaping scathing video on his YouTube channel, the Matt report definitely recommend people go and check that out.
And he's extremely furious because he's always been the advocate of the blue collar website implemented who this is really going up against. A lot of other people are very angry about it, whether or not they're going to get affected or not. If you're world. Is wordpress.org and everything you work in is that then in a world where we all feel it's a little bit smaller than it used to be at the moment, this could hit your mental health at exactly the wrong kind of time.
So go and check out the Matt report video, Matt Mullenweg has responded to my materials, his video, and apparently they're going to have an interview about it. They're going to have a conversation. So I'm really looking forward to that. But. What a time to put something like that out. It really is yet another, I think a lot of people would say a PR GAF.
But anyway, over to you
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:15] yeah. Dovi what did you, you mentioned before we started recording you it's being outsourced, you said? Yeah.
[00:27:22] So according to post stat and Matt indirectly, it's, he's utilizing some third-party service to do that. So it's an offering push through.com. Personally, I did this exact thing.
I specifically charged $5,000 for a website to make websites back in the late nineties. And it's a very interesting situation, but what I will say is I don't ascribe to the scarcity mentality as much, and we always forget that wordpress.com is still a business. Look at EDD and WooCommerce will commerce getting acquired by automatic Hertz CDD in essence.
But it's also good. So we don't know where it's going to end, but I'm just going to say this before I get out my Pitchfork. I'm going to honestly say that wordpress.com does these and throws it on the wall. And if there's pushback, they take it off. Does anyone remember the we're accepting themes to wordpress.com?
Submit your theme to be posted and sold on.com? I went through and I made a theme. Took one month I had it ready to go. And then they're like, Oh, just kidding. We closed the doors. It happens over and over again. So I don't know if it will last that long. I don't think it was ill intentioned, but remember, they're a business and they're trying to make money.
And that's what people are doing. Trying to just get a site set up quick. So they're trying to get ahead of Elementor and make sure that wordpress.com stays relevant.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:45] We'll be touching more on the element or comparisons a bit later, but Michelle, if you've got any thoughts on this.
Michelle Frechette: [00:28:52] You're where you're coming from, as far as your response depends on where you are as a designer developer, web builders.
So w in my five years as a freelancer, I was up to maybe charging $2,000 for local in my region websites. And most of those people were like, Oh my gosh, I don't know how I'm going to afford that. And so for me, that would never have been a competition. Because I was not able to charge $5,000 in my area where I was building websites.
No matter what I was building, whether I was trying to implement commerce at a complete e-commerce system or a simple brochure site. It says it starting at $4,900, that's not going to include e-commerce sites. That's not going to include some more, the robust things that's going to be for a brochure site.
So for me, that was never going to be competition for somebody who's able to charge more. Maybe it's competition, but even then I still my customers didn't care. What I built on. They didn't know whether it was WordPress or Wix or Weebly or custom code or what it was. They just wanted to wanted it to look good and they wanted it in as quickly as possible, but they also wanted that constant conversation and input.
So I don't know that it's going to look like what we've expected. And in as freelancers and as agencies, that communication is not, it can't possibly be the same when you're working with a global organization like that. And so I don't know if it's really going to be that big an issue for most people.
And also I would challenge people that maybe if you were like me and you were charging $2,000 website, granted that was over three years ago still Perhaps you aren't charging enough and you should raise your price. So I don't know the websites anymore. I work for a plugin company, but I would have taken that as a personal challenge to find clients that were willing to pay those prices and then offer them a better service by being that, more touchy, feely, and in contact and supportive of them.
[00:30:42] Go back really quickly. I think the WordPress economy as a whole way, undercharging. Like any other industry in the world for the same amount of labor that people put into some of these products, they'd be charging 10 times, no joke. I'm outside of this space and insight. And so I think we probably need to recognize that we're all under charging.
And honestly, if this helps to elevate people to start charging a value that they're worth. That can't be a horrible thing, but it is a bad timing, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:12] Yeah. I think the timing is a cause of, anxiety. But Cameron Jones in the show notes, sorry, not in the show notes in the comments says a lot of the angst is also the way automatic with two teas.
Get to use the WordPress trademark in any way they want. In some ways the services now being is being presented as the official in quotes. Service for WP site dev. So a couple of things occur to me. Number one, imagine the SEO on this, imagine that you are somebody going out and you are looking for, and I don't know if.
The 5k price point came about because that is just what they can subcontract it out to and still make a profit. Or they've discovered that is basically that the sort of mode, a price that people are prepared to pay. But imagine that people are going out, searching for 5k WordPress website. You're you really are going to find it tough to beat.
Wordpress.com or wherever this is going to be hosted on a, on an SEO place. So that sort of is interesting to me. I do wonder that ability. Yeah. Yeah. And Cameron says exactly that credibility. Does this feel now official? If you want to do something well, you go to WordPress because they're the people that designed and built the software.
So it will be interesting to say how they pitch this. If they do get into the language of get a website from the people who curate the WordPress project, if they start to stray into that area, where do we go from there? And how does that feel? And I think Matt Madeira, Austin, his video was basically trying to make the point that it.
Increasingly, it looks to him as if it's a more of a sort of SAS offering come to WordPress, get everything, we'll do your website, we'll build it and everything. But Matt modern work to be fair, did go out and say, he is literally not trying to grab projects off people. And he did in fact say, I don't remember where I read it.
It may be was in the Matt Modaris post that if you feel that we've used up to you. On a project and you find out that something that you were pitching for was in fact, given to us, contact us, actually get in touch and we'll see if we can put it right. But I don't know what that means.
Michelle Frechette: [00:33:16] Remember to have the people make decisions on spending that kind of money in two ways, financially and emotionally. So how are you pivoting yourself in the market to address the emotional part of things and how you can appeal to people through what you do and what you provide? Because I think that's where the difference is going to be.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:32] Yeah. If you wanted to check out the post on the Matt report just go and Google, I spell it to WordPress now, and he's deliberately using small w small P and Matt Mullenweg in reply to MapReduce. He did do quite a, probably a two or 300 word reply, trying to break down all of the points that Matt makes as he goes.
So it would, it was, Nice.
Paul Lacey: [00:33:55] I'm really looking forward to that episode actually, because I've put in the comments myself in the YouTube video that I would love it to be a two-part discussion because I know that the two maps on this are going to have such Opposing perspectives on what is going on here, thing.
And I remember the DHH interview that that Mullenweg did with with DHH and DHH was on the offensive. And Matt was very astute on the defensive and you what you got was more of a debate competition more than an actual resolution of it. And I would love to see, this is why I want to see two parts.
I'd love to see, Matt Madeira is putting his point, Matt Mullenweg, doing his great job as usual of knowing his facts, knowing his perspective and defending that really well. And then the two of them being able to go and come back a month later. And say, I understood what you said there.
That's made me think, and my perspective has changed a little bit because I don't think we'll see much of much perspective change in that interview. It'll be definitely, really good in entertainment, but I'd love to see the second part on that. I also think that what you said, Michelle about the, if you've got something fairly unique, you can use that as a kind of.
This is, Hey client, I used to charge $4,000. You can then say I now charge $6,000 and I'm better than wordpress.com, which is a kind of off the shelf kind of service. And that's why I charge more than wordpress.com. So there's definitely opportunity here too, for some people for sure to actually use it as a comparison point.
And to say that, no, we don't, you're not locked into wordpress.com where you can't really do a lot. No, we use wordpress.org software and we can do anything with that. I think Matt Madeira and a lot of the people who were very upset about it more upset as Matt, especially is talking about the constant, what he would probably term as gaffes.
Whether it's, the WooCommerce pricing thing or this, for instance and just creep, this kind of idea that you've got things like Jetpack, which is a kind of funnel within WordPress to some of their SAS based services. And I think he's starting to get extremely tight about these things.
It's pretty clear in this video that's get into him. But it's definitely worth watching and then take your own opinion from that and join the conversation. Cause it's a good conversation and my modeling works directly involved in it now.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:10] You can imagine the comparison tables over the days and weeks to come people, we do [email protected].
Does this, we cost this, which is half of what wordpress.com does. There are definitely ways that you can win out of this, but just interesting doing that.
Michelle Frechette: [00:36:25] My favorite is you can reach me by telephone. And then there's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:29] yeah. That's it. Yeah. I am an actual person at the end of the phone, my Doby.
[00:36:34] So let's be honest. wordpress.com originally was in his hands to WordPress. Like it was a managed blog, but wordpress.com is realizing that there's a lot of money on the table. In my opinion, I think Matt sees a vision where he needs to become the center of the deployment of websites. You can see that in his acquisitions will commerce and.
Focusing on blocks and trying to go in that direction. And this is just a natural progression of that right now. It may be for a third-party service, but in the end it may be pre-packaged wordpress.com setups specific for different needs to compete with square or Squarespace and other sites like that.
I think we're going to see that more and more. They're trying to push it. Start designing blocks and blocks are going to help you make money gone are the days probably of Avaya. And big all in one solutions that kind of do everything. There are a lot of competitors who are working to own the pathway for people to build websites, Ella mentor various ones out there, and they're just going to keep growing.
So the question is where do you want to fit in? And is this something we as a community really want, or are we going to push back and I'm going to guess that the community is going to be okay with it. So adaptor die. Unfortunately, things are heading in this direction unless you are big enough to own the pipe.
You've got to hook into a pipe or you're going to be gone.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:56] Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Let's move on to the next one. By the way, we should probably say just before we move on, that piece was from WP Tavern. It was written by Sarah Gooding. You find [email protected] rattles freelancer community. With new website building service launch.
It was came out on the. 4th of January last year, okay. I'm going to sh I think I might even manage another segue here because Doby was just on, about, adapting or dying. Here's another adapting or dying thing. This is all to do with the block system. Again, WP Tavern, only this time. It's just in Tableau.
He produced a piece called block system will create more commercial opportunities for WordPress theme authors. I'm expecting that. Dover has probably got the most to say about this being a theme author, but just to paraphrase, Justin is saying that. In the past it was all about the theme.
In the future, the theme, as we know it, I think he used theme in quotes. The theme will disappear and we'll get to the point where more or less everything is some kind of block. And we'll have the user interface as the main mode for doing things. And you'll have little, I'm just trying to find the images on this piece.
You'll have little sort of thumbnails of headers, thumbnails of footers, thumbnails of testimonial blocks that you might like to put in. Then you also moves on to talk about. How these can be designed to have like a unique brand, there might be ways for making the brand so that it's consistent.
If you drop in a block, it adopts them, the branding and the colors and so on and Genesis, he points out as an example of doing that with their general Genesis blocks. And then finally he talks about actually I won't go into that. That was probably said enough already. So anyway the idea of.
Blocks being the future reusable, sorry, not reusable blocks block patterns as well. What do you reckon about this daily? Is this a good commercial opportunity? Because that's what Justin thinks get in this early. And you could be one of those people back 10 years ago, who got into themes early and did really well out of it.
[00:39:48] Yeah, without question, this is another one of those pivots in WordPress that if you've arrived this wave, you can find yourself in a really good seat. There is a need and there is still a lot of gap that doesn't happen out there. There are blocks, but not all of them are pretty. And just like you were saying, Nathan, you can come up with templates and designs.
That's what Redux tried to be. Right? Redox has a template gallery inside of it. And I see a lot of other people going that way. When it comes to themes, I think you'll, if you look at things like stackable or co quibble, or any of the other block plugins, they almost replace a theme.
You can build entire sites with the click of a button, things like Redux. It's going to be interesting to see if themes ever really exist in the future, except for empty themes, like Astra, just things that are built for speed and that's it. And everything else lays in blocks. The block pattern piece is still in my opinion, very archaic, and we'll still need a lot of work, but it's going to be really interesting.
And if I were, you I'd be splitting all my time into blocks because whether we like it or not, that's, what's coming down the pipe and we can't really stop
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:54] that. Yeah, we're still in a sort of phase again, if I just put the screen back up the sort of UI for all, this is a bit clumsy. And Justin talks about the fact that who was it was is it Caroline?
Mark? Is that her first name? I've got her last name, but I'm not sure if I got her first name. I apologize if I've got that wrong. Put this yeah, Carolina nine might apologize her. Amanda. Armando theme, which kind of offers the UI that you can see on the screen. It's basically an lift near the publish button.
You get this kind of dropdown option where you can see things that you could put as a header and see things that you can put as a footer looks pretty good, actually. Although Justin says, it needs a lot of work. It does seem like we're getting there. Yeah, I feel that in two years time, this will be the way that I'm building websites.
I won't be. Playing with a theme at all. I'd just be dropping in these little header blocks and footer blocks and probably, having going out to the community and looking for what they're creating all the time. And yeah, it just seems like the future to me. I know that there's still a lot of pushback about all of this, but I feel that it's a pretty much a done deal at this point.
We're just waiting for it to mature.
[00:42:00] Let me be saucy here. And I'm just going to be flat out, honest, transparent as can be Carolina. You should make a plugin because your reach is only for your theme. You can do the same headers in a plugin. You can override any template in a plugin, and then your reach is so much bigger.
And I think that's how theme developers need to think. You can release a theme. That's great, but release blocks as well or plugins to do that, or maybe make your block. That's part of your theme. A plugin installed. They don't have the overhead of the theme review team and everything. And you can build for the masses and suddenly now you have a greater opportunity.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:38] Any thoughts on this Paul
Paul Lacey: [00:42:40] or Michelle? Oh, Yeah. Yeah. That's all right. Like a bit of saltiness on this check for sure. So you know what I think with the kind of weight off my shoulders of three years of quite a lot of pressure and stress running a company I, over the Christmas period, I certainly feel far more open to the idea of the block editor and, and maybe I was just stressed and.
And angry about stuff all the time, but so I can't see where it's going. I can't, but I know that it will go to the place that it needs to. I just can't visualize it. I look at what's there and I think how's it going to go from here to something I would really fall in love with, but I think. I've just got to give it time, let some of the, the innovators from the core team.
And then obviously a lot of the innovators from third party teams get involved and sort this out and S and just keep my eye on it. I saw a video that really helped me understand the concept of full site editing as well, which was Adam prizes, WP crafter channel on YouTube. And he did a really good video about looking at, I think Caroline's.
Carolina's theme. I assume it was using her one and it had, the UI in the left hand side, which looks similar to the customizer. That's the classical customizer. And it was a really good video from a kind of a different perspective that we normally look at these blocks. So I do recommend going and checking that out because I did see a bit of the future and did understand it a little bit more after that.
I also had a good conversation actually. Just before we broke up for the holidays, we've muni out on Twitter. I've put the link in the show notes to the. The Twitter thread you posted a thread about, do you think it's going to be the best year ever for WordPress in 2021 Amenia Komal for anyone who doesn't know is definitely trailblazing and the whole blocks, the world of blocks and Gutenberg editor and creating some amazing plugins that patch a lot of the functionality that we don't have.
He's very excited about it. I was definitely a glass half full in my responses. And we were just having a really nice conversation about that and one of the nice things as well is that yep. Mine's totally empty at the moment.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:01] Mandeville rock to the top. It's great.
Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:45:05] He's he has agreed to to come on the panel in 2021. And he's not done any kind of public speaking or anything before. And I managed to convince him that we would look after him and make sure that some really relevant stuff in to talk about because he's so well positioned, like Dover, you said too.
I think his name is going to be around for some, for the next 10 years in this space. And he's one of the people giving me hope that this, that some smart people out there are going to make this an amazing tool for me to use from my perspective. I'm sorry, Michelle, if you wanted to. Yeah,
Michelle Frechette: [00:45:38] my only two sentences that it's still so volatile is that it's changing.
It's growing it's morphing so much right now. Yeah. But it's not intuitive to many users. So I find myself having to Google so much to be able to produce one page. And so it's still not easy enough for me to use without putting in a lot of extra time and effort that I haven't found it worth it. I use it for posts because I just use it straight out of the box for posting, but everything else I use with the builder for pages and things that are more static content, because I just don't have the time to invest in relearning and relearning it as we go.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:14] Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to try yet another segue. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hijack the I'm going to hijack Paul the numbers in the articles. I'm gonna go. Sure.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:25] That's a good idea. To
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:28] eight. This one, we'll come to that one, right? The end. This is the admin bar. This is Carl van Doosan's piece, which he wrote on the 2nd of January.
Kyle, basically. Yep. Is a elemental user and he makes the point wrote at the beginning of the article that he's not really wanting to build his own themes or get involved with the wrangling PHP or anything like that. So page builders are aware it's out for him, but he's been, he has become concerned about the bloat of his page, builder of choice, which is elemental.
And so he's gone out and he's tried to do some straightforward, quick and easy testing, and he does make the point that, he's not trying to. Compare anything on a very deep level, but he's just making some quick assumptions at the beginning and he creates this that you can see a fairly typical landing page.
It's like a home page. If you can see it on the screen, it's got a few has got a few rows with a hero and a sort of call to action and so on and so forth. And it creates that an element or any creates that same thing in Gothenburg and just going out and doing a few quick. Test see, test that against GT metrics.
And the two are reasonably similar. That Gothenburg comes out ahead, but only by a few percentage points, the differences in the all that start. But then he goes to Google page speed insights, and it's like night and day. Really? What was 46 per cent on Google page insights becomes 94%. And so he's asked himself the question, is it time to switch and a bit like Michelle?
The answer is yes and no the switch he can see is coming, but he's, it just doesn't think there's enough in there yet for him to jump ship because of all the theme building functionality that, that element or how so the ability to create archives and all of that kind of stuff in elementary is great.
Try to do that again. I wouldn't bug at the minute. No, but he, I think he thinks the writing's on the wall. He then actually just for the point of clarity, then actually goes on to create a similar post, which you can find right at the bottom where he talks about it, oxygen. Against Guttenberg and they're much closer.
They're very, almost identical. In other words, that is to say that oxygen performs equally well as Guttenberg. But anyway, there we go. Just a fascinating piece, Paul, I know you wanted to talk about this.
Paul Lacey: [00:48:34] I just really enjoyed reading this piece because I think I just resonated with the majority of it that I could totally see the end product that you get.
If you put the work in with the block editor is going to smoke element or BeaverBuilder or some of the more traditional page builders in terms of performance and code output, it won't actually smoke oxygen for its code out output because oxygen's code output. Is as good as the block editors and Gutenberg's, so it's not 100% true that it, smokes all of them.
But I just really agreed with his opinion on that. He's, it's not there and it won't be for awhile for someone who is doing client websites and needs to push them out quickly at less than $4,900 to make profits.
Fred, Ronnie Michelle.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:33] I heard you. Good.
[00:49:35] Yeah, so Gutenberg pre renders things. That's the whole point, like the template and the HTML and the CSS are pre-rendered. Ella mentor is a. Adaption of visual composer, BP bakery, where everything is a PHP short code, going to a function, running the PHP and executing. So of course there's going to be better speed.
And then there's also divide us big time in Beaver and Elementor and WP bakery. Gutenberg and oxygen have taken a different approach, but I do want to stress this. The interface is not faster. WordPress has this problem. They think everybody has super JavaScript machines and Gutenberg is slow.
Just like the customizer, just like Elementor just like oxygen. You can only put so much JavaScript in memory in order for it to be performance. So the experience is not always the best, but the output, what people see and what kind of page ranking of what your users are going to get is in a better approach.
I just hope that we solved the other piece as well, so that, it's actually usable. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:42] Okay. Okay. That was interesting though. So you can go and find that at the admin bias, the blog on the admin, bob.com. Okay. So we missed the piece out. We're going to really change tack. Now this is about acquisitions, so many acquisitions.
It feels like over the last couple of years, so many things have been acquired and here's another one. This amazes me. Because of the numbers involved. And we're not for once talking about the numbers of dollars, we're talking about the number of employees. So if you've tried to go out there and find a calendar plugin or something that can create I dunno, events, let's say then you've probably stumbled across the modern tribes, the events calendar.
Liquid web certainly found them. I don't know what they've paid for them. I don't think it's introduced in this article, but again, it's just in title of WP Tavern, writing liquid web acquires, the events, calendar, WordPress plugin from modern tribe. And I am just blown away by how many people are involved in this plugin.
So 50 is the number 50 people. Full-time I say full-time, I've no idea if it's full-time, but there are 50 people who've moved across to liquid web. Liquid web are also incidentally the owners of themes. And although the two are going to be kept separate. It's interesting. Cause restrict content pro was bought last year and that very much is like an thing.
Whereas this one has been apparently kept separate. So there won't be initially any compatibility. If you're on a liquid web hosting website, presumably there'll be something there, but you don't necessarily get a benefit if you're an iCIMS customer. That seems to be the way it's going. But 50 people on a calendar plugin, what.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:19] Second. It's the second coming of I themes as well. Isn't it? It's like we, the risen, from from big changes in the company and everything but yeah, 50 employees, know Bernard is in the comments and you probably can't say, but the thing that I thought about when I saw this was that I always think when I think of is this plugin, I actually thought it was, Scott Kingsley clock.
Who is the, think the lead dev, there were maybe like two or three other people that thought it was. And so no, there's a whole army of people, but Scott is, I think the lead developer that, and I wonder if that means Scott has ported over to To the new liquid web as well, because he's obviously one of the employees I would imagine.
And obviously Scott is the lead dev for pods as well. So I wonder what that means to the new owners of Scott. Let Scott work on the pods projects and I assume nothing changes there and I'm shooting. That's a big part of the discussion that's happened. Would it be interesting to see what happens, but I never big acquisition.
And
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:21] What is the like, is everybody after an events plugin? Is that like a basic thing now that all websites have in this era of COVID, is everybody putting events online? Is that where this is suddenly?
[00:53:32] I think the whole point is to own the experience and own a solution of some kind.
Yeah. You've got the e-commerce service solution. Now this is the event solution. So if you're a hosting company or trying to differentiate, you are better than somebody else because of X. And so I think that's why people kept doing that. That's why GoDaddy bought tow blocks right there. They're trying to be that solution probably as well.
And WordPress is getting into that. And now I think,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:58] yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:54:00] I feel like the hosting industry is still quite. Young as in terms of it's still, one hosting company buys the other one, then another bigger one than that buys that one and another bigger one than that buys that one. And it is basically just, yeah, there's just a monopoly grab at the moment.
That's it still hasn't finished, a couple of maybe 10 years ago, the hosting companies were all just purely based on how many hosting customers that got. All of the customers are now somewhere. So what's the next thing that the hosting companies can acquire the can't acquire more customers from people so they can acquire these.
Like they've said the experience that they know people will have using their products. What do you need WordPress hosting? Because you're making a WordPress website. So you may as well, buy things in. So it's, this is just more empire building, I think, by the hosting companies. And I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's just how I see it.
And,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:56] The numbers speak for themselves though, 50 employees, but also on wordpress.org, currently 800,000 active installs. Now I don't know where that puts them in the all-time greats list, but it's pretty close to the top. I wonder if there's a yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:55:10] cause it's a niche product as well. It's not like every website has an event calendar on it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:14] I just wonder if it's a, everything's gone online with events and B that's a big mailing list that you can suddenly start to ping. So yeah. Okay. All right. If nobody's got anything else on that, we'll move to the next one. If I can find my show notes, where the heck have they gone? He said gesturing on his mouse.
The next one is you Mr. Lacey, we're talking about this piece on WP Tavern. I think I put this in there. Talk about it. Sorry about that.
Paul Lacey: [00:55:43] That's all right. I forgot about that. I forgot because we skipped it. And then so this one is on the WordPress to heaven, and it's an article by Justin Tatlock called 2021 Taiwan reshaping the Tavern experience.
And he's basically putting an article out too, to give everybody an idea of what's changing WordPress Tavern over the over 2021. And some of the things that they're going to start doing and that he does talk about it as if. W we're just getting started now. It's not like we're launching this next week.
And then the thing after there, he's talking about these are, these are some of along alongside writing really good articles, which they always do. Here are some of the plans that we want to do, and they want to get themselves a bit more what he terms on the bleeding edge.
There is a new design to the website coming which will be good because I'm sure that lots of people have fed back on the current design, which personally I've always really liked but what they want to do, they really want to get into blocks. So if they're are going to be writing about blocks all the time they really feel that.
Let's see what it's like to live and live in work with the block editor every single day and see how that works. And so that's fantastic. They've got a podcast coming out. No, no plans as exactly when that will be or what kind of format it will be. I think that's going to be very interesting as well.
And I think I think that was it, there was some other stuff in that forum that bringing back the forum. Yeah. I don't remember the form cause I never because I think we've worked with Steven reshaping, probably Dolby builds at this weekend. WordPress needs to reshape because we kind of shape ourselves and cuddle up alongside their articles to a certain extent.
So w we're particularly adjusted in what this reshaping means, but I think that Justin's probably noticed that. Typical comments on there on the back end of a blog post, probably don't do the articles, justice, because they are right in some of the most interesting journalistic pieces out there, in my opinion in WordPress.
And and people want to talk about them. So I know that it says in here that they're bringing back some elements of kind of forum nurse. So that might mean integration with social media. It might mean something that's on the page. We don't really know yet, but they're trying to improve communication.
Design and an expand their kind of media portfolio a little bit as well with a podcast
[00:58:07] yeah, wrong. But when they relaunched the website, it was a re-skinning of Justin's old theme, like his original theme before he came to be part of them. So he was very comfortable and can really iterate it. But he is all in on Gutenberg, that, because everything he writes is about Gutenberg.
So I think it's great that he's going to eat his own dog food. That's fantastic.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:28] Yeah. I think it would be really interesting if he takes this as an opportunity to experiment, I wonder, you were really wouldn't want the whole website to be an experiment, but if there were bits of the website where he's demonstrating, he writes a piece about this thing just happened and you can do this with it.
And then somewhere, maybe on a sub domain or something like that, we get to see what his tinkering resulted in. And he really, it is his job to literally. Explored to be paid to explore and see what's out there and what so at the bleeding edge. And I think this is fabulous. I can't wait. And also the forum, I think I'm going to, I live and breathe WP Tavern anyway, or consume most of what's written.
So the idea of having a forum, I must admit I'm not that a big user of Slack. There's a few Slack channels that I'm involved in, but I don't find myself in that I have to deliberately go there to be engaged. And also, I do think Facebook and groups are not the right place for WordPress. WordPress, in this sense, the WP Tavern, obviously we've got our Facebook group and it works great, but I don't think WP Tavern would benefit from that.
And so bringing back a forum to me, sounds like something I would be there with bells on.

[00:59:36] See you, you better really feel that I'm Nathan,
Paul Lacey: [00:59:46] the podcast will bring in more voices to WordPress Tavern as well. I assume, I don't know if they're going to do interviews or that kind of thing, the voice of WordPress Tavern is very much, Justin and Sarah Gooding.
Yeah. It's two voices most of the time and you don't usually see things like interviews even text-based interviews or anything like that. So it's those two speaking and then people commenting in the comments that are, so I think one of the things I really like about these plans is that it feels like it's opening up the whole conversation a little bit more, which would be great.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:23] When we did the page builder summer, I did reach out to Justin and he was kind enough to put an article together about it. And it was incredibly thorough. He created a Google document full of I don't know how many way more questions than he had time to respond to. I responded to them all, but then, editorially had to pick the answers that he thought fitted with what you want to write.
But there was a lot that went into it, he spent a good deal of time creating those. So just feel is. Everything about that guys is in the right place. And I'm just keen to see what he does in the near future. Michelle, if you've got anything on that, I know that you're pressed for time, so I don't want to don't want to waste any of your time
Michelle Frechette: [01:00:58] if you I'll be watching along with everybody else to see how it develops.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:02] Yeah. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:03] Great. We love you, Justin. Yeah, we do.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:08] I don't know if you follow him on social media, but he's just got a new house and he's got cats and it's quite nicely. It seems to be taking cookery as a bit of a meme in his own life at the moment trying to get right. And that's
[01:01:19] why he's going to do podcasts. He didn't have a good internet where he was before he complained over and over.
So now I can see it being interviewed.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:27] I invited your mom powerful. Yeah. I invited him onto our, this in fact. And he declined because connection and there was a couple of things I think, in the calendar. So it'd be nice. I would love to have him on that would be like, I've died and gone to heaven and he could have you
[01:01:44] on, and
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:44] then you can yeah.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but then it's going to be nice to keep your eye out. Let's see. It's a fairly, it's a fairly slim D do you know what? I hope he keeps it nice and simple like this though. I'm showing a picture of WP Tavern at the minute, and it is basically, you can imagine him in Gothenburg writing this because it literally looks like you would be editing it in Gothenburg.
It's nice and simple. It's, images that don't stretch, full width, simple text, nice font, white background, nothing cluttering in the way. It's going to be nice. Final piece. No, there's no final piece. We did it. We've already done the final
[01:02:18] in your prison.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:19] Yes. Michelle. Michelle has asked that she can mention this and I would like her to do it.
So this is under represented in tech.com under represented tech.com.
Michelle Frechette: [01:02:34] This is the opportunity to find a diversity for your projects for your business. If you click over to find contributors there. This is a way for you to find people who are interested in doing what you do. So on the left-hand side, you can choose what specialization you're looking for.
So maybe you're looking for WordPress or Mitch's anything on that left-hand side, and then you can choose on the right hand side, the opportunity that you have. So for example, Nathan, if you click WordPress on the left-hand side and speaking speaking out a podcast on the right-hand side,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:09] speaking on a podcast
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:10] and then click search, you're going to see anybody who's in our database, who is in an underrepresented group come up in this list and all of these people are underrepresented in some way, and also fit the criteria that you just selected.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:29] Err, I say this because I am such, I really don't want to put my foot in my mouth here, but what is the qualification for underrepresented? Is it possible to sum up in the time we've got,
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:41] If you click back to that main page, you can take a look at the list, right? So does anybody want to go home to the home
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:48] page
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:50] and then click I'm looking for opportunities?
Top left.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:52] I'm looking for this, just here, some profile or just, yep.
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:56] Yep. And then you can see what questions are asked for the profile. So they go right there. There's your list? So those are the underrepresented groups in technology. So female non-binary black or African-American Asian, Latin, Hispanic black of color.
LGBTQ totally disabled neurodivergent or older than most people would expect in the tech industry. So things that would actually set you apart and that aren't represented usually on the stage, if you think about conferences and things like that was it two years ago that there is a PHP conference in Europe that was completely canceled because they had only men.
Yes. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:33] right. I remember that.
Michelle Frechette: [01:04:35] Yeah. So this is the kind of thing that can help you find people to ask them, to apply, asking somebody, to apply, to speak at your event or asking somebody to apply, to be on your podcast or write a blog article doesn't mean that you're committing to hiring them.
It doesn't mean you're committing to putting them on the stage, but it's at least making sure that you are reaching out to people that you think would be good. Maybe I'm not the right person for you. You invite me. And I submit a talk that does not fit with your conference. It's okay. That I didn't get selected.
Because at least I knew about the opportunity and I was invited to be part of the process. And the whole idea is that at the end of, re reviewing all of the applications, you've had some diverse people actually apply for the position or applied to speak or apply to. Yeah, your podcasts, whatever.
If you look at most podcasts, myself included, if you look back over all of the people who have been on the podcast, are you looking at representation? Are you looking at a whole bunch of white faces? Are you looking at, 75 or more percent? Male.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:31] Wait a second. Every book's the old saying right now?
Michelle Frechette: [01:05:36] So this is a great way to say. I wonder who else at WordPress would be interested in being on a podcast for example, and I've used it myself and I'm inviting people to be on WP coffee, talk, who, fit that. Now I'm already hyper-aware of that. And so my track record is really good because I'm seeking people constantly to get a different voice from different parts of the world.
And for different experiences, but not everybody thinks that way. So it's Oh, somebody wants to be on it. We'll let them in on it. But do we actually seek diversity and representation in what we are putting out there for the rest of the world? And the whole idea behind underrepresented in tech is to have that representation, but without tokenization, it's not we had one woman on there.
Once last year, that's representative. It's not representative if you've only tokenized one person. So the idea is to be truly diverse and to represent diversity in our projects and in the events that we're putting
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:23] on, I've noticed that you've gone for the underrepresented in tech.
Presumably you know, you, the people that you know, that would have worked with you on this are in the WordPress community, but this is broader than that, you'd have to be a WordPress user. This is anybody. Correct, right?
Michelle Frechette: [01:06:38] Yeah. We didn't want to pitch it all into WordPress. We wanted it to be anything.
So if you scroll down, you can see all the different specialties that we put in there. Graphic arts, accessibility, public speaking all of those marketing SEO, things like that, that aren't necessarily specific to WordPress, but there is a WordPress box there too. So if you're looking specifically for people in WordPress, you can find them.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:57] Which is cool. Have you received much traction? Has it been, obviously we just selected a couple of boxes and out came. Some people I didn't keep scrolling. I dunno what we have
Michelle Frechette: [01:07:07] about 50 50. We just launched this. Our soft launch was in November. We haven't, we're not putting any marketing dollars into this.
It we're not making any money off of this. We do have sponsorships, they're all in kind sponsorships. So anybody that shows up at the bottom of the sponsor has donated services, donate their plugins, donated their hosting, et cetera. And so we're, it's, we're not. Pocket. We're not lining our pockets with anything because it's free to join.
So it's free to be listed, but we don't want to too. We don't think we should tax anybody. Who's in an underrepresented group by making them pay to be part of this equally. If I make a contributor or if I make a, somebody who was hiring or looking pay, that's also taxing. The underrepresented person, because it should be free for them to be found.
And so we're not making money off the site. It isn't about that at all. We do have a tip jar because there were some people who really wanted to contribute and that's fine if people want to contribute, they can. But that's the Ellie Nimmons is my partner in this. The two of us are not in this to try to make money.
We really built this as a gift for the tech community to be able to be a more diverse and better represented
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:10] group. They just on that point, the, if like me you put on an event like I did last year, this is a genuine challenge in that essentially the people that I know are the people that I know, and they might not represent what the world.
Has out there. And so something like this just makes it simply easier. It makes that job easier. So yeah if you've just been watching this and you feel that you'd like to submit a profile or indeed find some contributor and there were a whole range of things that you can look for under represented.
Check. And I will
Michelle Frechette: [01:08:43] tell you that we want to make sure that people with disabilities are equally represented. And we do recognize that the site right now is not fully accessible. We just underwent an accessibility audit and changes are coming. So if you're trying to use the site right now, you're not finding it particularly easy to navigate as somebody who has disability issues feel free to contact me.
And I will work through that with you until we actually have the site updated to the point that somebody can navigate it easily.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:10] Okay, thank you so much. What a nice project. Underrepresented attack.com.
Paul Lacey: [01:09:14] Paul, I just want to nominate Michelle for like community contributor for the last 12 months. So there is an award for that somewhere.
I'm sure. Fact, should we just give that award now that w
he goes to,
Michelle Frechette: [01:09:36] they don't know that I'm wearing a red shirt. Now, my face matches. It
[01:09:41] was
Paul Lacey: [01:09:41] very sweet. You do a lot of work. You do a lot of work for free
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:47] people. Like you make this whole thing worthwhile. Thank you so much. Nice project. Sadly time has got the better of us. We've got another episode of this week in WordPress next week.
2:00 PM. Is that right? Is it 2:00 PM? Yes, it is. It's 2:00 PM. UK time, WP belts.com forward slash live. I'd like to thank Paul Lacey. The co-host who's not there. He's there every week makes the effort to come very much. Appreciate it all the award for. Honorary, cohost. Nice guy fun.
Fundamentally. Good to do the award. Michelle Frechette. Thank you for coming on. Dovi whom I can't say it. So name everybody. And we'll be back next week. I'm not
Paul Lacey: [01:10:27] sure. I think Dave should get the business insight award. Yeah. But good. For those kinds of commercial business insights in WordPress. So you get that award.
You get an award when you get an award and Nathan everywhere pressing the buttons.
Michelle Frechette: [01:10:47] No, the Oprah of WordPress,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:51] I want the pressing the problems of
having more hexagons than anybody else. He's got so many Mexicans it's temporary. If you have to look on the video to see we'll be back next week. I appreciate your attendance. Thank you for all the people that put in the comments. We can't put them all up. We just can't. There's just no way, but thank you so much.
If you came and watched us today, take it easy. Have a nice week. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.